The following continues our serialisation of excerpts from the previously unpublished novels of Belfast author Gerard Keenan, long time pseudonymous contributor to The Honest Ulsterman. This material is reproduced here by generous permission of Gerard’s son John and is edited and introduced here by Dr James Gallacher who is currently preparing a book length collection of Keenan’s creative fiction to be published this coming Autumn under the title Bohemian Belfast and Dublin: Two Artistic and Literary Worlds in the Work of Gerard Keenan (Edward Everett Root Publishers).

The fourth extract in this series is taken from a voluminous cache of writing that was completed between 1962 and 1963; concerning the earliest period of life in Belfast covered within the series, the piece in many ways showcases Keenan’s writing at its most biographical. Presented as a reminiscent bildungsroman, the text charts Keenan’s adolescence from the beginning of secondary school at the Christian Brothers’ Technical School on Hardinge Street, off the New Lodge Road, now Edmund Rice College, through to his first employment as a newspaper clerk at the Irish News (fictionalised here as Northern Star).

 Alongside an illuminating insight the workaday culture of mid-century Belfast, the story charts Keenan’s earliest literary stirrings, plotted as they are correspondingly with pitted acts of schoolboy rebellion, a low-level subversion of a rather stygian status quo. Coming under the influence of older members of his school, in particular the future literary critic John ‘J.B’ Kilfeather, concealed here as Robert Cunningham, Keenan recounts the beginning of what would become a diffuse bohemian network of writers, musicians, and all-purpose delinquents intent on negating what they perceived as the cloying influence of social and religious propriety. Finding its first manifestation in a hostile takeover of his school’s Old Boys’ Society, forming within a drama group that would eventually translate to a nucleus of the Belfast Arts’ Theatre; Keenan’s circle would provide him with the circumstance and support to foster and develop a voracious appetite for literature, art, and critical debate that would later underpin his career as critic for this magazine. Above all, this particular extract should be read as a foundational narrative within the context of Keenan’s wider work, wherein the Belfast of the 1940s and 50s is slowly transformed to the Farset of his memoirs; a place of hidden subversion and intellectual endeavours, subterranean as the Farset river, underground tributary of the Lagan.

[***]

One morning in the autumn of 1939, in Farset, I was sitting in class in my first term at a secondary school. My classmates and I were nervous, as the teacher, a layman known among the boys as ‘Rab’, had a reputation for fierceness. This morning, however, Rab was cooing with sweet reasonableness as he inaugurated us into the mysteries of solid geometry.

     The class room was a large one and another group of boys was seated in the desks at the father end. These were the fourth year students, aged fifteen or sixteen years old; there was less than a dozen of them. To us twelve-year olds they seemed to be men.

     Rab, a chunkily built man who wore plus-fours with all the panache of a military dictator, stopped his discourse suddenly. His face clouded as he stared at the senior boys. He strode a few paces away from us and called across the room,

     “Can I believe my eyes! Cunningham! Are you combing your hair in class?” We stared in fascination at Cunningham. He was a tall, hawk-nosed boy with long, straight, black hair. He was smiling and completely at his ease. His companions too were smiling.

     “My hair was rather untidy, sir,” he replied.

     “You will put away that comb and you will never produce it in my presence again,” Rab spat, before returning to his position before our desks. What we saw now made us pray that Rab would not look across the room again. He did. Cunningham was calmly recombing his glossy hair to the sniggers of his classmates. In a very low voice, his face pale, Rab said

     “You are an impudent, ignorant lout of a corner-boy, Robert Cunningham.” Rab then swung instantly to us, gently asked us for our attention, and completed the geometry lesson. He left the room. While we were awaiting the arrival of the teacher for the next session of the morning Robert Cunningham came across the room and took up a stance before us.

     ‘What you witnessed today was your first real lesson in this school,” he said. “Your teachers are all bastards. They are your enemies. You must always oppose them. Remember that.” There was clapping and hooting from the other seniors. As Cunningham returned to them with a sneer, one of them came up to meet him and pinned a hastily assembled paper rosette onto Cunningham’s lapel.

     “By a unanimous vote you are hereby elected Number One Champion of the oppressed students of this school,” he said formally. This boy, who was shorter than Cunningham, was pink-cheeked with girlish, curly blonde hair, almost beautiful, ‘though he was feared as a swift fighter. He was the only boy I knew among the fourth-years, as he lived in my district of the city; we shared the refined accent of the district known as the Antrim Road accent. He was called Gallagher. On the rare occasion when Gallagher acknowledged my existence, in school or around our common neighbourhood, he addressed me crisply as ‘young Riddle’.

     The gulf in years and status was too great for me to get to know Robert Cunningham, but I watched him covertly, all the time. I learned that his associates addressed him as Cut. He had two lieutenants; Gallagher from the Antrim Road and McCann, who came from Cunningham’s own district of the Falls Road. McCann was tall and dark like Cunningham, but was red faced against the other’s pallor and already had dark bristles where Cunningham looked as if he would never shave.

     My only contact with Cunningham and his two lieutenants was when they were performing their stint as timekeepers in the entrance hall. Whichever one of them was in charge o the notebook wherein latecomers were to be recorded for the Head Brother he was always accompanied by the other two. They had made it known that personal rudeness to them was the only offence for which they would enter a demerit in the latecomer’s book. I was a habitual latecomer. I was never reported.

     After Christmas they did not reappear among the fourth years. I had heard that the three of them had decided to study for an examination that required them transferring to another school in the city conducted by the same order of Brothers. I felt that the school was a greyer place without them, but I was too young and too busy to be broken-hearted for long.

     I stayed for three years at the secondary school. I do not know why my mother did not keep me there longer. It is unlikely that money was the reason, as I did not pay fees and two of my sisters were wage earners. There was never any discussion of the subject that I remember. My mother was a widow; the war, the rising prices, the upsets consequent on the 1941 air-raids, had her mind sufficiently exercised. I wanted to leave school and my mother allowed me to have my way.

     In my boyhood I had been small and timid; during my last year at school and at sixteen I was tall, small-boned, and dark haired; add to that a hooked-nose and I looked like a fair-skinned Indian. Soon after leaving school I got a job as a clerk on a Farset morning newspaper called Northern Star. Everyone was pleased; although I was a clerk it was supposed in the family circle that I would be editor one day.

     One of the book-keepers at the paper, a man called Eugene Martin, became friendly with me. Martin was only a few years older than me, but a staid way of dress and shaggy black eyebrows suggested a sternness of character that made him appear much older; he was a past pupil of my old school. I welcomed his daily conversations, as his interests were wide and his attitude critical, and under his influence I soon found myself reading systematically and, when at the movies, studying the credits that I had heretofore ignored.

     Martin did not live near me; he lived over the bridge, somewhere in Ballymacarrett, so we met only during working hours. Outside work my friends were mainly old schoolfriends. In the evenings, after my tea, I went round to ‘the avenues’, as we put it, a grid of parallel streets in the Cliftonville district, set in from the main road and free of the through-traffic. We rarely met by appointment, there was always someone at a door. However, one boy I was most pleased to meet in the avenues was not an old schoolfriend; he had not been to secondary school. His name was Sam Bunting, some four years older than me and employed as a radio mechanic. He was small, his hair receded deeply at both temples and he appeared to be delicately built, til one looked closer and saw that his wrists were cubes of bone and his knuckles were like brass rings. Sam Bunting was far from his schooldays, the boys I knew around the avenues were given to tough conversation: if one were to believe them, they fought often, they had their women regularly and they were not beyond burglary if the pickings were high enough to be worth the risk. Bunting dismissed these confessions as mere imagination.

     Bunting’s workshop, in the attic of his home, became to me some kind of enchanted setting. The floor was uncarpeted. On the bae floorboards sat many grandiose wireless cabinets, vain luxuries emptied of their contents, representative of the bluff and the falseness that Bunting scorned. The wireless set innards were his only concern, and these he ranged on the workbench, functional metal boxes dense with wiring and valves, inside each a valve a tiny acute artefact. Bunting would work at one metal box and we would talk. Alone among the avenue set Bunting was a drinking man and often he would talk about his drinking adventures with his one close friend, Cathal Banim. I did not know Banim. I knew the Banim’s public houses and their off-licences, but I had not met Cathal or his brother Anthony, as they did not mix with the avenue set. Bunting said that Cathal was an educated and well-read chap, more my sort than his, ‘though Bunting’s drinking relationship with Banim remained an odd one to me, a mystery.

     One night there were bandages on both of Sam Bunting’s hands, the result of his previous night’s drinking with Banim. They had drunk whiskey steadily in the Washington Bar in Howard Street until the critical point arrived, as apparently it always did, when one picked a fight with the other. They went out to the courtyard at the back of the Washington to settle the argument. This time Banim suddenly flourished a sheath-knife and succeeded in slashing Bunting’s hands; Bunting indicated this to me by crossing to the wardrobe and holding up for me his ruined trench-coat, the front of which was caked in blood, now brown and stiff like leather. Overcome with a spasm of remorse, Banim had, Bunting said, slashed open one of his own hands. At this stage their reconciliation had been interrupted by the alarmed barman who told them both that the police had been phoned for. The two boys bolted through the back exit of the bar and into the streets behind the City Hall. Banim threw away the knife and they hailed a hansom-cab, one of the odd resurrections that were plying for the trade of the U.S soldiers who were stationed in the city, and ordered the cabby to drive them to the American Red Cross that was established in the old Plaza dance hall not far away. They told the officials there that an American serviceman had knifed them in a bar quarrel, receiving for their war wounds medical attention and cups of good American coffee.

     This story I enjoyed and I believed. Bunting had other stories, ones less enjoyable and less believable too. On several occasions, he maintained that both himself and Banim had been held overnight to sober up in a police cell. Once this had been at the instigation of a tram-conductor who had given them in charge for threatening him when he had asked them to leave the car due to their drunken state. One such night, returning home late from a typically excessive beer-up, the two boys discovered that they had on their tram this same conductor. They took tickets to Glengormley at the end of the line, a route that lay through what was almost open countryside. Towards the terminus the top-deck of the car emptied and the conductor came up to alter the destination sign for the return journey. Bunting had placed himself in a seat at the back, controlling the staircase down to the platform. Banim was to the front, by the staircase to the driver’s cabin, and the conductor was trapped between them on the top deck. The two boys gave him a beating, leaving him unconscious. The iron roar of the tram, hurrying on a deserted road, on an upward slope, screened the racket of their attack from the driver. They went down to the exit platform, pulled the bell, and were dropped off at the next stop.

     There were weaknesses in Bunting’s story and I preferred to think that he had exaggerated. I did, however, find myself longing for an opportunity to meet Bunting’s cultivated, violent, and hard-drinking friend, Cathal Banim.

     I never had a drink with Sam Bunting – I was never asked. ‘Nor did Eugene Martin, who had assumed the role of my mentor in matters more civilised, ever suggest that I join him for a drink. But when in the spring of 1943 I received a letter from my old school inviting me to attend a meeting of their branch of the Catholic total abstinence association known as the Pioneers for the purpose of taking my final vows I decided to attend the meeting and to formally opt out of the association. I need not have done so, I could simply have ignored the invitation. However, I had been president of the school branch and had read a paper to the school on the history of the association and its founder, a Father Cullen. Also, the schoolmaster whose enthusiasm sustained the branch was a favourite of mine. A scholar-athlete of striking good looks.

     On a Sunday morning I returned to the old school. The meeting was in the assembly hall on the ground floor. The outside of the schoolhouse was as shabby as ever, but there were new desks in the big classrooms, shiny yellow wood that shone in the sun of the bright spring morning. ‘Crackerjack’ O’Paor, the teacher I admired, was the only teacher present. Boys queued by his desk waiting to enrol in the senior chapter of the association. Before O’Paor was a pile of certificates of the pledge and a box of metal lapel badges. I joined the queue. There was no one from my year present, uncomfortably emphasising my scrupulosity. However, when I came to O’Paor and explained my unwillingness to take the pledge myself, his eyes lit up.

     “That’s an honest attitude, Riddle, and I respect it”, he said. “Just one point – would you mind if I asked you to wait behind and discuss your reasons with myself and my committee?” There was nothing I could have wished for more. I seated myself at a desk at the back of the hall. Whilst I waited, a cigarette landed on the desktop in front of me. I looked up, startled, as O’Paor peered over me and said, sternly “I hope you aren’t going to pretend that you don’t smoke.”

     When the last boy had got his tissue-wrapped insignia, the little shield he would supposedly wear in his lapel for life, O’Paor made a brief address to the gathering, laying stress on the voluntary nature of their sacrifice. Then he dismissed them. Heading down to the other end of the room, by the wall-blackboard, he joined a small group of youths at a table, his committee. I quickly recollected the disputing points I had prepared before, after a while, he called me over.

     “Gentlemen, this is Jim Riddle” he said. “I think he came along this morning only to look for an argument and I think we will be able to give him one.”

     There were five members on the committee. To my intense pleasure three of them were Robert Cunningham and his two lieutenants, McCann and Gallagher, the rebel trio I had so admired in my first year.

     I put forward my view that drinking, even drunkenness, was a universal experience, encountered as often in the best literature as in life, and that to forswear it appeared to me to be an unnecessary impoverishment. O’Paor discussed the abuse of drink and then spoke of my personal risk of a potential craving for alcohol, impossible to anticipate, being released by my first drink, a craving that might prove impossible to control. We wrangled about this hazard a bit. O’Paor offered to take me on a pub-crawl at his expense as a controlled experiment. I declined, saying that I was not yet ready to drink and that he was not an appropriate companion.

     We were interrupted by a boy, the recent leader of the Pioneers in the school, who had been acting as treasurer to O’Paor thing morning. While the teacher, his back to us, examined this boy’s accounts, I found myself staring at my fingernails. A little roll of paper was flicked onto my hand. I secured it and looked across the table at the committee. Cunningham smiled at me and silently pointed at the roll. I discreetly unfolded it and read: ‘stick to your guns, Riddle. We’re on your side.’

     I was relieved that Cunningham did not think that I was a fool or a prig, yet his presence on a committee such as this puzzled me. I had been worried, as Cunningham had not spoken in my defence, indeed he had not spoken at all. I decided that he was playing some deep game, the rules of which had as of yet not been revealed. I did not get a chance to speak to him as O’Paor ended my interrogation soon after by extracting from me a promise that I would not drink until I had another talk with him; I left as the committee got down to other business.

     During the summer of that year I did very little. Occasionally, I saw Sam Bunting in the evenings up in his workshop, but I was never out with him. I saw Eugene Martin every day in the Northern Star office, but outside the office saw him only in public libraries on Saturday afternoons. I always had used the Central Library in Royal Avenue, but Eugene Martin had shown me how the choice of books offered from branch to branch in the city was be no means identical, but varied with the taste of each branch-librarian; each Saturday Eugene and I rendezvoused at a branch library in a different suburb. We met in the library and parted at Castle Junction, the tram-junction in the centre of town.

     I went to dances in the parish hall and sought a girlfriend. I wanted a girl who would be as interesting to know as Sam Bunting or Eugene Martin; the limitation was too astringent. Twice, I formed a feathery liaison, each time with a girl who was attending a Dominican Sisters secondary school, a girl of some intelligence. I was not able to develop my affairs as the paper I worked for paid me too small a wage to be in a position, when I had given my mother her share, to take the girls out.

     Then, one day in the Autumn of 1943 Eugene Martin asked me to go along with him to the rooms of the Old Boys Society of our old school where the editor of our rival Catholic newspaper, the Irish News, was to lecture on a P.E.N convention he had recently attended in London. From press reports Eugene knew that several American writers who we were reading had spoken at the convention and he thought we might hear some first-hand gossip.

     Gossip there was, but it was couched in the terms of old-fashioned American baiting, with many references to horn-rimmed spectacles and fat cigars. The lecture was given in the ballroom of the club, which was crowded, mostly with old boys of a distant year. After the editor had spoken, the chairman asked for questions and comment from the hall. There were several speakers, then Eugene and I, from where we sat on a window ledge overlooking the seated audience, noticed a minor commotion going on in the middle of a row of chairs towards the back, where the younger past pupils were gathered. At the centre of the commotion was Robert Cunningham. He was seated between his two friends, Gallagher and McCann, who had griped his arms and were trying to lug him to his feet. Cunningham was resisting, while a middle-aged man in a row nearer the lecturer’s table, rose and, with a nervous, began vainly to attempt to establish his voice above the throng before Gallagher, Cunningham’s Antrim Road lieutenant, snapped impatiently

     “Sit down, Tommy. Cut was on his feet first.” Tommy turned round in confusion, smiled foolishly and offered a sheepish apology before sitting down. Cunningham, who by this time was blushing, said something rude to his friend before, finally, standing to address the audience, prompting a small but unironic cheer from the back row. Cunnigham’s delivery was not facile; his blushes had disappeared and, as he spoke, his whole body writhed and rocked to the form of his well-defined lips. He was wearing a very shabby tweed overcoat; even from where I was sitting, the big tatters that hung at his cuffs were clearly visible.

     Cunningham’s delivery may not have been facile, but despite his youth he was strangely authoritative. He deplored the facetiousness of the lecture. To tell us that these distinguished American authors boozed was, he railed, merely wasting our time: all men drank. With a wide-ranging ease that made my eyes glisten in envy Cunningham listed and appraised the works of the transatlantic visitors to the P.E.N convention and he asked could the lecturer not have found something to say more appropriate to such achievement. While Cunningham spoke, the lecturer looked down at his notes and occasionally smiled; the chairman, bald and middle-aged, a solicitor and president of the Old Boys Society, frowned murderously. Cunningham set down to cheers and applause, mostly from the back rows, in which Eugene Martin and I joined. McCann and Gallagher thumped his back and shouted rowdily.

     A hasty succession of speakers rose to make amends for Cunningham’s rudeness. In the lecturer’s winding-up speech he made a brief reference to Cunningham’s youth.

     When Eugene said that we must wait behind and have a word with Cunningham afterwards I was delighted. To see him, we had to stand for a while on the perimeter of a circle of older members who were bantering him, although from what I heard they all seemed now to be in agreement with his opinions. When these men dispersed, Eugene and Cunningham launched into a discussion of reading involving many names that I had never heard of. Cunningham produced a hard-backed notebook where he had a record of every book he had read, entered in monthly budgets. Cunningham’s friends, McCann and Gallagher, joined in the conversation with Eugene Martin for a while, but then went to play at the lecturer’s table, now deserted. I divided my attention between the two groups. McCann, tall and red-faced, took the lecturer’s chair. Gallagher, blonde and chubby, seated himself in the front row of the chairs and was the audience. McCann reminisced about the P.E.N convention, attributing to John Dos Passos and Thornton Wilder indecencies that delighted me by their originality.

     When I left the Old Boys Society rooms I had stars in my eyes. I knew Cunningham’s haunts now. Indeed, Cunningham had asked Eugene and me to attend the Old Boys weekly debating group where, he said, he was outnumbered by the old guard. That night at home I wrote to the society applying for membership. Also, I recovered from a drawer a hard-backed cash book that had belonged to my father and there and then I commenced my reading list.